The call came at the start of a three-day intergovernmental meeting at FAO headquarters in Rome to deal with the doubling of average world food prices since 2000, which has accelerated sharply in the past six months. In an indication of the seriousness of the situation, 44 heads of government are attending.

FAO chief Jacques Diouf told the meeting that he had warned nations last year of the gathering crisis, and asked for &dollar;1.7 billion last December to maintain food production in poor countries by giving farmers emergency access to seed, fertilisers and animal feed, the prices of which had jumped from 60 to 98% in the preceding year.

“It was all to no effect,” he said. “Only when those excluded from the banquet of the rich went into the streets to express their anger and desperation were responses made.”

Advertisement

Lack of investment

Yet those emergency responses are against a background of steadily falling assistance for food production in poor countries, Diouf said, visibly angry. Aid to agriculture has dropped by 58% since 1980, and fell from 17 to 3% of all development aid.

Diouf also called it “inexplicable” that despite globalisation there has been little investment in preventing communicable animal and crop diseases, including the Ug99 strain of stem rust which, he said, threatens wheat crops in India and China.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, speaking at the conference, said that food production will have to increase 50% by 2030 just to deal with projected population increase.

“Countries must support promising research into the optimal production of crops and better animal production,” he said, as well as applying known technologies to the existing food chain.

Science investment

The meeting is hoped to end in the general adoption of a declaration about what must be done to address the crisis.

A draft declaration drawn up by national delegations in the past few weeks already calls for immediate support for emergency programmes for people worst affected by the price rises, support for the FAO programme announced in December, and revising national farm policies so that farmers can produce more.

The proposed declaration is also unequivocal about science&colon; “We urge the international community, including the private sector, to decisively step up investment in science and technology for agriculture,” it says, including “researching, developing, applying, transferring and disseminating improved technologies and policy approaches.”

Government support for agricultural research has plummeted over the past two decades as rich countries produced food surpluses. The declaration makes no mention of increased support for public sector labs, such as the struggling labs of the CGIAR, which launched the last green revolution and which, unlike the private sector, focus primarily on the poor.

Biofuels blame

President Lula da Silva of Brazil strongly defended his country’s production of biofuel from sugar, and the Rome meeting is unlikely to call for much more than a “dialogue on sustainable biofuels”.

Delegates will also have to decide whether to set up a global food reserve to deal with emergencies, starting with rice as a test case.

“Countries could well afford to contribute to such stocks,” said Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, calling for regional food funds as well as actual food stocks to help expand production, storage and distribution of food and help with food crises.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy called the neglect of aid for agriculture over the past decades “a historic, strategic error”. He called for the setting up of an international scientific body like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but for agriculture, “to provide scientific analyses that are global, objective and incontestable.”